Assignment # 6: Psychoanalytic

It's nearly time for psychoanalytic criticism, and I CANNOT WAIT!!!!

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Sex and death, sex and death, sex and death!!!

I have to say, in just about every way, psychoanalytic analysis is awesome. One of my most mind-blowing lectures of all time came courtesy of Dr. Warren Ginsberg, whose analysis of the Dido and Aeneas love affair in "The Aeneid" was so powerful, so attuned to human nature, so vividly modern, that I am still more than a little haunted by its ramifications. Dr. Ginsberg gave what I would call a classic psychoanalytic reading, in which the character's behaviour was interpeted as the expression of unconscious desires and fears. Let's just say that ever since, the book has not been "just a book:" rather, a devastating tragedy of love both initiated and thwarted by mutual neurosis. So much for soulmates...

As my hero Lois Tyson writes, "when we look at the world through a psychoanalytic lens, we see that it is comprised of individual human beings, each with a psychological history that begins in childhood experience in the family and each with patterns of adolescent and adult behaviour that are the direct result of that early experience" (12). Super. To a psychanalyst, our behaviour patterns originate in our unconscious, where all our early emotional traumas are imprinted, but which we've repressed in order to function as children/teens/adults. Yet those bad times are not gone; they're not in the least self-healing wounds. Human behaviour has a curious way of actively "playing out" those conflicts, feelings, and experiences in "disguised, distorted, and self-defeating ways" - of scratching at our own scabs, you could say(13).

In Freud-speak, the unconscious employs a number of different defenses in order to keep a safe veil between itself and the conscious. Selective perception, selective memory, denial, avoidance, projection, displacement, regression, etcetera - all tactics to protect us from core fears, such as fears of abandonment, intimacy, betrayal, an unstable sense of self, or low self-esteem. Until such issues are recognized and addressed, they "determine our behaviour in destructive ways of which we are usually unaware" (Tyson 17). The bizarre way humans handle their attitudes towards sex and death are particularly revealing, and interested Freud to no end.

But what has this to do with literature? I mean, we can hardly examine the childhood of Aeneas, right? And wouldn't it be silly to attempt to explain the "Aeneid" by psychoanalyzing Virgil? Valid questions, of course. But they maybe miss the point.

There will inevitably be one student who reacts aggressively towards the introduction of Freud into the literature classroom, and variations on the above questions often accompany their eye-rolling. Do you have to "believe" that Freud was right in order to accept PC? I think not - he had a lot of wacky ideas, but even Freud himself changed his opinions, and hoped that others would extend and emend his theories. The point is: HUMAN BEHAVIOUR IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. And literature has an incredible capacity, through its nuances, its aesthetics, its structure, to allude and illuminate this paradox. Freud provides us with a common vocabularly to articulate the inner world, and the purpose of his classical PC was to empower people - to allow them to wrangle with those inner demons by giving them a proper name.

Anyway.

Psychoanalytic criticism is grounded in two schools: Freudianism and object relations theory, which "emphasizes the internalization of relations to other as a formative force that creates the self"(Ryan 36). This points to the work of Jacques Lacan, whose work focused on relationships, rather than how the mental life develops, in order to explain human behaviours. We must necessarily define boundaries between ourselves and others, yet this is a traumatic experience for wee little babies, and Lacan's work stresses lack and loss as a primal, unavoidable experience for all humans. Lacan describes our progression from the Mirror Stage to the Imaginative Order, and finally to the Symbolic Order: bridges between the preverbal and verbal stages. Ryan writes that "to learn language and to enter the realm of cultural signification is to learn to make do with out direct contact with the object named or signified;" hence, our sense of rupture and loss from a prior, preverbal world of complete unity (37). Behind all of this lies the Real, "the uninterpretable dimension of existence... we experience the Real when we have a moment in which we see through ideology, when we realize that it is ideology - and not some set of timesless values or eternal truths" (Tyson 32) such as language (an arbitrary construction of culture) has led us to believe. A critic acquainted with Lacan may attempt to explore a text in reference to these Orders.

Phew!

I haven't yet found a Lacanian take on a poem, but I'd like to see this in action.

The end!